International Social Science Review
Volume 88 | Issue 3
Article 15
2014
The Ongoing Burden of Southern History: Politics
and Identity in the Twenty-First Century South by
Angie Maxwell, Todd Shields, and Jeannie Whayne
John Herbert Roper Sr.
Emory & Henry College
Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/issr
Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons
Recommended Citation
Roper, John Herbert Sr. (2014) "The Ongoing Burden of Southern History: Politics and Identity in the Twenty-First Century South
by Angie Maxwell, Todd Shields, and Jeannie Whayne," International Social Science Review: Vol. 88: Iss. 3, Article 15.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/issr/vol88/iss3/15
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by Nighthawks Open Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in
International Social Science Review by an authorized administrator of Nighthawks Open Institutional Repository.
Roper: Ongoing Burden of Southern History
Maxwell, Angie, Todd Shields, and Jeannie Whayne, eds. The Ongoing Burden of Southern
History: Politics and Identity in the Twenty-First Century South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2012. xix + 208 pages. Hardcover $42.50.
Honored almost to the point of embarrassment, the Arkansas-born humanist and American
historian of the twentieth century C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999) was an ironic blend of insider
and outsider. He grew up privileged in a very poor region and was both conversant with great
novelists and poets and fiercely loyal to Clio’s Muse. He was a scholar activist whose work was
acclaimed by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Selma March, yet he was also
celebrated as a scholar’s scholar who trained some forty-one historians at The Johns Hopkins
University and at Yale University. In the present volume, edited by political scientists Angie
Maxwell and Todd Shields and historian Jeannie Whayne, the contributors reflect on
Woodward’s work, moving beyond a review of old and new literature to highlight the
connections to contemporary scholarship. Above all, they acknowledge Woodward’s lasting
impact on the fiftieth anniversary of his seminal collection of essays, The Burden of Southern
History, originally published in 1960, has passed a fiftieth anniversary.
Most true to the nature and characteristics of the historian Woodward is Robert McMath, a
historian at the University of Arkansas specializing in southern agrarian movements. McMath
examines the flagship essay of Southern History, “The Irony of Southern History,” and parallels
it with another essay on “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual.” Above all, McMath recalls
usefully Woodward’s twinned and twining but somewhat paradoxical directives for such study,
that one should take seriously the complaint of those in a social movement but remain detached
from advocacy for their specific political remedies; and that one should not belittle their very real
sense of grievance, but avoid pumping for their partisan platform. To these vital perspectives
McMath brings the political scientist’s concept of “contentious politics,” in which partisans
contend against their foes, especially if the opposition seems to them entrenched in the major
political parties and in dominant financial institutions. McMath then looks at the current Tea
Party social movement, taking seriously its heartfelt grievance against globalized banking and
finance and also taking seriously the way both leading Democrats and leading Republicans
support macroeconomic policies that hurt the small businessperson, especially in the rural South.
Most entertaining, and most fully based on research in Woodward’s papers at Yale
University and transcripts of interviews stored at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
is the essay, “The Therapist of the Public Mind,” by James C. Cobb, a trenchant and at times
hilarious social and cultural historian at the University of Georgia. Cobb draws on a note by
Woodward to his dissertation advisor that he on occasion intended to be a therapist for a public
much troubled by social affairs, especially race relations and specifically the long-enduring
attachment to Jim Crow. He shows, in a cleverness worthy of the master ironist Woodward
himself, that Woodward’s concept of a unique “burden” in southern identity became nothing less
than a personal burden for the man who found his own first work —on reflection in the smoking
ruins of urban unrest in the period 1968-1974—to be overly optimistic and whose revisions and
reconsiderations in that period and thereafter are uniformly in this volume judged to be overly
pessimistic.
Leigh Ann Duck and Patrick Williams score valid points about what Woodward did not do.
Duck, a literary scholar at the University of Mississippi, marks it that Woodward in these few
essays describes white men, telling us nothing about women, and nothing about blacks, thus
perpetuating in his description of southern identity chauvinist and racist exclusion. Williams, a
Published by Nighthawks Open Institutional Repository, 2014
1
International Social Science Review, Vol. 88 [2014], Iss. 3, Art. 15
political historian at the University of Arkansas, notes that Woodward was so fascinated with the
lovable losers and pregnant failures—the carpetbaggers and scalawags and the biracial and even
interracial Populists––that he does almost nothing with the winners, the long-running Democratic
Party, which, whatever else, must have practiced something other than “dark arts” of force and
fraud to make its wildly successful appeal to the masses. Each scholar is right, but each also is
making a few essays bear a remarkable weight, since the essays by nature are intended to be
provocative and suggestive and are quite different in kind from the thoroughly researched and
fully documented (though no less provocative) Origins of the New South (1951) or the biography
Tom Watson (1938).
Political scientists contribute three essays closest to the heart of Woodward’s substantive
research on race relations and their particular manifestation in voting and office-holding. Wayne
Parent of Louisiana State University takes the 2008 presidential election to test for persistence of
a southern identity based on “shared history” and marked by lower incomes, lower wealth, lower
educational levels, preponderant rural residential patterns, and heavy concentration of black
population—as well as persisting southern connections, that is no great influx of non-southern
population. With these statistical markers, Parent finds a persisting political expression of
identity in a “shrinking South,” with North Carolina and Virginia being least “southern” and
Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana being most “southern” in overwhelming opposition to a
black presidential candidate as expressed by rural, poorly educated, relatively poor,
generationally persisting southerners. Charles Bullock of the University of Georgia demonstrates
that the essayist of the Burden was entirely “too pessimistic” about black political participation
in the Second Reconstruction (a Woodward term for the latter-day civil rights movement from
1954-1966). A more interesting essay, and one reflecting some sound quantification as well as
artful reinterpretation, is contributed by the team of Hanes Walton, Jr., Josephine A.V. Allen,
Sherman C. Puckett, and Donald R. Deskins, Jr. This cohort takes Woodward’s “innovative
perspective” concerning “neophyte voting behavior” among freedmen both in 1868 and in the
period after 1947—times when people denied the right to vote were suddenly and in large
numbers permitted to vote. In both instances, Woodward insisted that the newly enfranchised
showed “maturity” and “wisdom” instead of naiveté—and certainly no corruption. The team
offers quantitative tests for each region of the former Confederate states, and then extends the
test into the period after Woodward’s death. They conclude by praising Woodward for his
optimism and faith in democracy as well as his useful diagnostic tool for testing voting behavior
among those so newly come to the suffrage.
John Herbert Roper, Sr., Ph.D.
Professor of History Emeritus
Emory & Henry College
Emory, Virginia
http://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/issr/vol88/iss3/15
2